News from Polska – Romanian-Polish Cooperation

Five of the most remarkable and original Polish artists of the moment came to Bucharest in February and March to attend a micro-festival named 'News from Polska'.

Luana Pleşea, 02.04.2016, 14:29

Five of the most
remarkable and original Polish artists of the moment came to Bucharest in late
February and early March to attend a micro-festival named News from Polska
held by the National Centre of Dance and the Polish Institute in Bucharest.
Various theatre shows, dance shows and performances included in the festival
reflected themes that are representative for the contemporary Polish theatre
and for theatre in general. All the themes approached were related to the idea
of personal, artistic, national and human identity.

For instance, a monodrama called ‘And Christmas Will Come’ has been
inspired by the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, which killed 96 high-ranking
Polish officials on board, including the country’s president Lech Kaczynski.
The idea belongs to the protagonist of the show, actress Agnieszka
Przepiorska.

Agnieszka Przepiorska: There was a
time in Poland, after the Smolensk catastrophe when I was like in between jobs.
I was sitting at home, I was reading newspapers and everywhere were these women
looking at me, looking at all Poland and talking about how they suffer. They
were everywhere, these overnight widows in Poland, wives of big politicians.
And I asked myself why they were allowing journalists coming into their lives
so much because they were opening their doors inviting them into their houses
and talking about what happened. Some of them did, some others didn’t and I was asking myself why some women open the
doors and some don’t. And that was the beginning of my thinking about these
widows. It’s not like into politics this solo performance. It’s more connected
to the emotions of a woman who lost her husband who was a big politician and
she didn’t have her own life. I don’t know if I am right but politics is like a
background of this solo performance.

According to Iulia Popovici, a curator of the News from Polska
festival, one of the reasons for staging this event in Bucharest was to
introduce the Romanian theatergoers to performances that aren’t commonplace in
Romania, such as the monodrama. This genre is very appreciated and very
representative for the Polish stage. Three such monodramas were presented
during the News from Polska festival: And Christmas Will Come, Diva,
ID-ance.

Closing the
festival was a show that brought several artists together. The Dolphin Who
Loved me is a performance combining documentary theatre, new media and
physical exercise. The project is based on John C. Lilly’s NASA-funded experiment
in the 1960s, whose purpose was the teach English to dolphins. The focus is on
the heartrending relationship between Margaret Howe Lovatt and the dolphin
Peter. Directed by Magda Szpecht, the show is a real challenge for the public,
approaching theatre as a place that broadens imagination.

Here is the stage
director herself: I took eight moments from
the experimental which were the most important. And about these moments are the
segments of the performance. Every scene is based on one important moment in
the experiment. But it’s not exactly the story. But every single scene is an
impression about what we knew, about very concrete moments in history and what
happened in the laboratory. I think the main topic is communication in this
performance. Not only between the performers, but also between what happened on
the stage and what happened, what does the audience feel. Because I had such an
idea that on the stage are dolphins, and on the audience are humans. So we had
to make everything to give in the beginning this feeling, like, hmm, we have
something in common, so maybe we can communicate, but we are not the same
creatures.

These are not the first such events to bring Polish theatre and
dance to the fore of the Romanian audience. There is already a public for such
events, looking forward to new proposals. Curator Iulia Popovici told us more
about the News from Polska festival:

So far, the Polish Institute
has organized either monodrama shows or small dance festivals. For this reason
we wanted to bring these two areas together and focus on an extremely important
reality in Poland today, namely women’s creativity. We presented shows in
various forms written and interpreted by women, focusing on various
perspectives on the lives of women, stepping outside the discourse of what a
woman would usually tell another woman, or without being openly feministic in
their approach. The shows actually gave a voice to women artists, who are very
influential right now in Poland, shaping the public’s perception on mainstream
theatre and dance.

Romanian-Polish cooperation is very rich, also transparent in the
production Steel Mothers, a Romanian-Polish project spearheaded by Madalina
Dan and Agata Siniarska, presented recently at the second edition of the Bazaar
International Festival of Independent Performance in the Czech Republic.